Thursday, August 28, 2008

Recently Youtube got a new features: Subtitles and captions. You can upload a subtitle file to your own videos, so the viewers can get subs. Softsubs, that is. And you can add as many as you want.

So what format are those subtitles in? "Anything that reminds of SRT and SUB goes."

So: Yes, Aegisub supports Youtube subtitles. Just export to SRT when you are done.

Remember that while Aegisub doesn't show SRT (and other formats) as an option in the regular Save As dialogue box, you can still save directly to those formats. Just add the appropriate file extension yourself to the filename, and Aegisub will pick the right format automagically.You can also just pick regular "Save" if the filename (as displayed in the window title bar) already ends with eg. .srt.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

You may wonder why there is no version of Aegisub that works on Windows 95, 98, 98 SE or Me, together knows as Windows 9x. The reason is part technical-practical and part ideological.

The ideological part is short and simple: All of those operating systems are outdated, no longer under support by Microsoft and in general regarded as far inferior to the Windows NT line of systems (2000, XP, Vista). We would rather see people stop using outdated technology.

The technical part mostli lies in Unicode support. All Windows NT versions are native Unicode from the kernel all the way to the user interface. Windows 9x is not. The only way to get some kind of Unicode support on Windows 9x is to use the Microsoft Layer for Unicode library, but even that only gives flaky support at best. We did try building Aegisub against MSLU (unicows.dll) once a long time ago, and failed. Then decided that it wasn't worth the trouble.

True, Aegisub's support for Unicode isn't perfect. There's problems with right-to-left/bidirectional text and probably also several other complex scripts, but it's far better than only supporting one codepage at a time.

Finally, of course, there's the question of number of potential users. In the time this blog has been up (around a month) we've had one sigle hit from a user searching for a Windows Me version. There just isn't a user base large enough to justify the amount of work it would be to create an inferior version.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

A while ago, I posted about Kanamemo, a tool that I made to help me learn Hiragana and Katakana. Another tool that I've made to help me in the learning of the Japanese language was TrayDict:

TrayDict is a very simple application that sits on your systray until you bring it up with WinKey+Z. Then it lets you type a word in Kanji, Kana, Rōmaji or English, and it will search for it in EDICT (or any of the other supported dictionaries), returning every match, ordered by relevance.

The catch is: it's a complete hack. I made it in just a few days, without worrying at all about how well it'd work - I just wanted a tool for personal use. Even though I'm posting the link to it here, here are some things that you'll have to keep in mind:

It has a bug that prevents Windows from shutting down as long as it's running. Right click on it on systray and choose "Exit" to terminate it.

There are no options at all. The shortcut is WinKey+Z, and that can't be changed. You can also bring it up/down via systray.

This is no longer maintained, so don't bother sending bug reports and/or suggestions.

For a long time, I've been meaning to rewrite it, with less bugs, more customization, support for regular expressions, rendering with HTML+CSS, Kanji information, etc... But, alas, I wanted to use HTML to render this, and my experience with Trident, Gecko and WebKit were all catastrophic, so I've lost some interest. But maybe, if there is a demand for it, I'll pick this project up again.

Anyway, here is the Win32 binary: LinkThe source is available here, but the HEAD is completely broken (result of my experimentation with Gecko), so you'll have to dig the repository for an older version.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Some time ago our SVN server (source code management) stopped working. We aren't sure what went wrong, and since we haven't been able to reach the administrator of it we've had to move the repository to a new server.

Fortunately we have had access to full repository backups, so no data is lost. However we have had to re-create the user database, so if you had commit access before but don't have it now, please contact one of the project administrators.

About Aegisub

Aegisub is an advanced subtitle editor for Windows, and UNIX-like systems, such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD. It is open source software and free for any use.

Aegisub natively works with the Advanced SubStation Alpha format (aptly abbreviated ASS) which allows for many advanced effects in the subtitles, apart from just basic timed text. Aegisub's goal is to support using these advanced functions with ease.